


Ocean Stars Falling

by misgivings



Category: Homestuck
Genre: And in general the fucked up state-enforced romantic system?, But everyone here is really happy and doing their own thing instead, Casteism | Hemophobia (Homestuck), F/F, Polyamory, Troll Rose Lalonde, Trollstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:07:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24902821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misgivings/pseuds/misgivings
Summary: Roslyn Lalond is seeking a particular star. Somehow, a goth girl sleepover happens because of it.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam/Aradia Megido/Feferi Peixes
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: Homestuck Polyswap 2020 - Prospit





	Ocean Stars Falling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liasangria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liasangria/gifts).



Roslyn shook off her hair as she climbed over the cliff's lip, and looked down at the trek she'd made. No wonder the temple had been constructed here - it was essentially inaccessible to one of lower blood. The way the ocean licked at this spire, one of the landdwelling castes would have to be suicidal to try it. There must have originally been a small land bridge. The contractors certainly hadn't hauled the materials up a forty foot rock wall. Roslyn could imagine it breaking away into the sea, maybe with the original construction crew still on it. Highbloods were capricious like that.

Her eyes went to the stars. On a clear night like this, her sensitive eyes could pick out the twinkling points that corresponded to the sign of her ancestor. It was no accident that it hung in the sky almost directly above the roof. It was pure serendipity that had led her here. That, and a few careful inferences from the biotechnical journals her predecessor had written.

The walls were completely featureless, standing the test of time against the elements in a way that gave this place an uncomfortably timeless look. An otherworldliness mediated by the impossibility. Roslyn knew there was no door. She traced a slight ridge in the ground, imagining the cable that must run underneath it. It lead to a bush, which she wasted no time hacking away at with her two short knives. There was a slate-grey podium, equally ageless, and a peculiar sigil on it reserved for devices that bended spacetime into a pretzel. Fearlessly, she stepped onto it and experienced the great unnerving sensation of her molecules being persuaded to exist in a completely different location.

Her eyes blinked once before she was adjusted to the gloom. The floor here was metallic, riveted down in neat little lines and touched with spots of rust. The salty sea breeze extended indoors, too. She followed the hallway, hand trailing across the featureless stone until she reached the main chamber.

Roslyn was aghast to see the interloper, carefully lifting some fancy gemstone off of a dias like she was Troll Indiana fucking Jones. She didn't need to see her t-shirt to tell she was a lowblood—she got all that from her sheer ignorance as she completely ignored the real treasure here, even as said treasure reached for her ankle.

"Watch out!" She yelled. The would-be archaeologist spun around, looking back at her and not where she needed to. Roslyn gestured insistently but it was far too late. The arm of the star-lusus lifted up and seized the ram-horned troll by her hiking pack.

She had not come here tonight to see a lady die. Lalond was running before the girl had time to shriek. Her knives cut away the straps securing it to her and she tackled her away from the creature, throwing a handful of offal from her bag to entice it away. The creature discarded the canvas bag to crawl after the chum. Roslyn took her chance to size up the girl as a threat, looking down at her on the ground. A big dopey grin shined back up.

“That was so cool. Do you want to do this again sometime?”

* * *

They did end up doing it again, although Roslyn hardly agreed to it. It just seemed to be that there wasn't a half-decent forgotten temple in the hemisphere that hadn’t caught Aradia’s attention. The key was that Lalond had little interest in treasure but wanted old eldritch secrets, and Megido was a FLARP clouder fighting tooth and nail for good locations. They converged in the same sort of locations—dusty, untouched ruins that required some serious legwork to track down and bore little in way of actual loot.

Actually running into one another wasn't common. Rather, Roslyn would buy out a rare tome before Aradia even heard of it, and Aradia would pick up rumours of where Roslyn was asking questions and put together the riddle before she could. When a site merited sticking around a week or more, they would bump into each other, and set up their field-expedient recuperacoons under the same tarp.

Roslyn honestly thought they were dating. Imagine her surprise when Aradia began talking about two other fine girls.  _ Very _ fine girls. Roslyn didn't consider herself spectrist but she was surprised a maroon was in deep cahoots with a jadeblood; not to mention the budding fuschia herself! That explained where she kept getting the tip-offs on some old seadweller secrets. 

“Say, Aradia,” asked Roslyn one night, watching the ramgirl inspect a rusty spike-trap, “Be honest with me. Are those two your quadrantmates? I don't mean to pry...but you sound awfully close for just allies.” Aradia tested the point of a wicked prong with her fingertip before turning around, a slight blush under her ashy cheeks.

“Soooort of. We’re not really...well, I think all of us are solidly concupiscent. Mutually! You can think of it like a soap opera romance polygon but instead of being complicated and dramatic it's mostly really awesome. And really flushed.” She smiled, fearless about the social defiance intrinsic in such an arrangement. “Actually, you're maybe the first person I've ever felt...haha, that's a story for another time.”

Roslyn took a moment to ponder it. It was facetious, really. She wanted to see if Aradia would panic, suspect her of turning her over to the drones for flagrantly shameful promiscuity. But she seemed more bothered that she almost clumsily admitted some black feelings, and totally unbothered by her quiet calculation. She decided she liked that.

“What, pray tell, do three trolls get up to when they're all matesprits?” Roslyn raised her most dangerous rhetoric weapon, her waggling and suggestive eyebrow.

“It's hard for us to date because we live such different lives, but when we have the time? We like to do sleepovers. Maybe you should come to one of them?” Aradia couldn't waggle any facial muscles independently, but her earnest smile was her most powerful persuasive element. Even on her part-time archaeological rival.

“How, in any world,” Roslyn chuckled, “could I possibly say no to that?”

* * *

Aradia’s farmhive was absolutely unassuming, and thus a far safer pace for a future empress to hide out and sleepover. Right now Aradia and Roslyn were sat on the floor with the most important troll on the planet. As equals, even! Roslyn’s gills fluttered a bit just at the concept.

“You know, there is one benefit to being on land.” Roslyn conceded, sipping from a chipped porcelain mug, “And it's that you can actually make a cup of steeped leafwater. It's so calming.”

“Rosie, that is the  _ dorkiest _ thing I've ever heard, and I know a lot of nerds.” Feferi tittered, turning over in her hands one of the fossils Aradia had collected. It was a primordial ocean creature that might have been older than her lusus, and it was captured in breathtaking detail in the stone. “Do you know anyfin about this? It seams right up your alley.”

“Anomalocaris, darling. They're not anything special, but worth remembering nonetheless.” She spared a glance in the direction of the blackout curtains, softly rimmed with a glow that could be nothing but the sunrise. Her face turned to concern. “Will Kanaya not be coming?”

“I wouldn't worry about her. She manages. Does someone have a crush?” Aradia said, teasing her and pinching her cheek.

“I do not! I'm just not sure-”

“A crush! Roslyn, you shored have told me!” Feferi kicked her feet in the air cutely and cocked her head. Her goggles made her gorgeous eyes seem larger-than-life. Roslyn blushed and turned her head away. 

“It's absolutely nothing. I've not met her. And in any case, you two are more than enough entertainment.” The ladies seemed to not mind her skillful deflection. “Tell me what it's like at the bottom of the ocean? I've been to the floor but never to such abyssal fathoms as yourself.”

Feferi painted a picture of what she'd seen down there: the colourful communities that clustered around burning-hot geothermal vents and the strange, unsettling creatures that lurked in the coldest, darkest crevasses. She described it with such glee that she missed how it perturbed Aradia, clutching Roslyn’s hand and swearing she was vetoing their snorkelling trip.

Nobody could miss it when Kanaya eventually arrived, because in unison they hissed and shied away from the light from the doorway. It was only a moment of flaring intensity as she shimmied her narrow frame through the smallest crack in the door, and then she shut it again and regarded the new guest.

Roslyn was still mentally dazzled by her entrance after she rubbed the stars from her eyes. She introduced herself as a barest formality, but they'd already met on Trollian. Kanaya put down a pillow and carefully sat amidst her gathered matesprits and their esteemed newbie.

“I can only make the barest of excuses. You know how my dreams can be, and in this case I could not tear myself away from it. I believe it must have been quite starkly prognostic, and I am embarrassed I didn't have the time to write it down before leaving.” She smoothed out her skirt and wiped her brow, offering no explanation for how she endured the solar radiation on her way here. “I um. I did run.”

“Feferi told me you were something of a fashionista.” Roslyn asked, propped up on one elbow and eyeing her over. Kanaya was wearing the same tank-top she gardened in, which was distressingly vanilla even by tame troll standards of fashion. Even stained in chlorophyll and sweat, she managed to look lovely, but it wasn't what she was expecting.

“Feferi told me this was decidedly not a date and consequently I saw very little reason to doll myself up. Were the occasion different I would burn to the cheeks for my offence and seek redress for arriving in such a state, if you can pardon the rather unintended pun.” She folded her arms.

“I dunno, it could be a date.” Aradia poked awfully close to Kanaya’s sharp mouth, stabbing a finger playfully into her dimpled cheek. “You love dates.”

“I love making an effort to impress. We dress up for others when we cannot dress up for ourselves—although, I do not struggle for confidence, necessarily.” She gave Aradia a little kiss on the forehead, rather than biting her finger off at the knuckle for the offence. Physical intimacy was a rare luxury for her caste.

“Roslyn is just mad because she has a crush on you.” Feferi said, leaning on Lalond and putting an arm around her. The circle they were sitting in had only grown close through the day and now one only had to lean one way or the other to get nice and physical.

“I possess no such item,  _ but _ -” Roslyn lingered on the pause, letting it gestate until it was deeply pregnant. She looked across the expectant women—all of them loners on their own time, pushed away from the rest of society for one reason or another. She, too, rejected the clustering societal instincts. A time like this, to let loose and be unabashedly affectionate, seemed so natural for them. With a deep sigh, she finally admitted. “I would like for this to be a date.”

Nobody jumped as Kanaya’s outfit changed on the spot—it was a seamless enough a change. The moondress had a cute quality to it that seemed at odds with her dry demeanour and the wry smiles she gave, but it also was very comfortable as she lay on her side with her head almost in Aradia’s lap.

“I’m glad that handy thing works all the way out here. Ladies,” She said, propping her head up and looking like she was posing for portraiture, “Shall we at once reclassify this as a date, and by extension admit we all find Roslyn Lalonde charming enough to be one of our, dare I say, girlfriends?” 

“Yes!” Feferi gave the vote of confidence with a tiny fist pump.

“Absolutely.” Aradia sat up straight. “And it's my hive, so I make the rules. Roslyn, like it or not you're our weird gothic girlfriend and there is no chance of you convincing me otherwise!”

Girlfriend. A curious word, but not without precedent. Innocuous, because it was not technically untrue, but the right type of person could infer a deeper meaning. Especially if they had read a lot of fanfiction. Roslyn had.

“I didn't plan on objecting. What does this change?”

“Well,” Feferi looked about wearing an unsubtle coy smile, sharing a meaningful glance with her co-conspirators, “we could start with some really stereotypical pillow fights!”

“Pillow fights?” Roslyn managed to ask as the others all wielded their implements of down-feather destruction. She never stood a chance.

**Author's Note:**

> The concept spoke to me. Heavily inspired by Star of the Ocean from Paradox Space, if anyone even remembers that thing anymore.


End file.
